Carney caught in Brexit mess
‘Meet Mark Carney,” runs t he new ad for the Leave side in the Brexit campaign, against the backdrop of an apocalyptic soundtrack.
The former Bank of Canada governor, who left in 2012 to head up the Bank of England, made millions working for Goldman Sachs, the investment firm responsible for “economic collapse” after organizing bailouts to the Greek government, the ad claims.
Over shots of firebombs going off in Athens, it then claims Goldman Sachs may still be “pulling the strings.” Cue shots of Carney in a parliamentary committee being asked by a pro- Brexit MP whether he has been pressured to come out on the Remain side by Goldmans.
“I refute it categorically,” the governor replied.
It is a remarkable exercise in political fear- mongering and an exemplar of the most ugly campaign in modern British politics.
One would almost think the Leave side is foundering ahead of Thursday’s referendum, were it not for new poll numbers that suggest 45 per cent of Britons want to leave the EU, against 42 per cent who want to remain.
It has placed Carney in a ticklish position. Central bankers are meant to be seen and not heard when voters are called on to make crunch political decisions. Yet not only is the Bank of England governor visible in the debate, he is now being presented as the personification of the kind of plutocrat who is benefiting from the EU, at the expense of British workers.
In some ways, Carney has painted a target on his own forehead by engaging with rabid anti- European MPs such as Jacob Rees- Mogg, who have called for him to be fired for supporting the Remain side in the debate.
Carney’s response has been that the bank has not supported any side. “The only side we’ve supported is the pursuit of low, stable and predictable inflation, which is our remit,” he said.
That’s true — to a point. The bank was initially reluctant to say much but, as sterling began to drop last spring, there was a feeling it had to intervene in some fashion.
When Carney did speak out last March in a letter on the subject that warned Brexit would weaken the pound and undermine investment, Leave supporters questioned whether the bank had overstated the positives of EU membership.
When Rees- Mogg said Carney wasn’t upholding the bank’s “Olympian detachment” from politics, the governor shot back that he had a “selective memory.”
Nothing positive was likely to come from going toe to toe with some of the swiveleyed loons on the Leave side — and it hasn’t.
The bank broke its selfimposed political “purdah” by warning Thursday that rising unemployment, a sharp fall in the value of the pound and higher unemployment would accompany Brexit.
Campaign chief executive Matthew Elliott responded with a classic example of playing the man, if you can’t play the ball.
“All the latest indicators show the British economy doing well, despite (Finance Minister) George Osborne and Mark Carney’s attempt to whip up fear in the markets … Staying in the EU is good for investment bankers like Mark Carney and his chums at Goldman Sachs but it is not good for British families,” he said.
In a letter this week to a Conservative MP, Carney continued to maintain the bank has a duty to report on its “evidence- based judgment,” adding he had not made his personal views known.
“All of the public comments that I, or other bank officials, have made regarding issues related to the referendum have been limited to factors that affect the bank’s statutory responsibilities,” he said.
Maybe so, but that doesn’t eliminate the prospect that the governor went beyond his mandate by wading into the murky waters of national identity.
Carney is an economist by training but a political animal by inclination. When a bank governor tells MPs that an exit from the EU is “the biggest domestic risk to financial stability” and the potential consequences could include a “technical recession,” it is intended to send a shiver around the committee room looking for a spine to run up.
The ver y mention of the R word was a political choice. During the Scottish independence referendum, Carney’s relatively modest interjection, that sharing the pound would require some ceding of national sovereignty, carried great weight with voters, who voted narrowly against independence. In that ballot, he proved to be one of the “no” side’s most compelling weapons. Carney, as a Canadian, was viewed as relatively neutral by Scots. In addition, a full and frank conversation with Scottish Nationalist leader Alex Salmond long before the vote meant the rules of the game were set and there was no confusion about their roles.
The concern this time is that he has overplayed his hand, in the face of effective opposition led by Boris Johnson, a man known as the Heineken of politicians because he reaches parts of the electorate others can’t.
It remains unclear whether the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox was attributable to the ugly feelings stirred up in this most unseemly of campaigns. But it’s already fair to say that no one is likely to emerge from it with their reputation enhanced.